Don Van Vliet 1941-2010

When I was a teenager, I heard two albums that baffled me, took all my preconceptions and threw them away and took me the best part of a decade to absorb properly. One was Bitches Brew by Miles Davis and the other was Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.

There was something curiously old-fashioned about that "his"; it seemed to evoke old-time acts like Mantovani and his Orchestra. This is strangely appropriate. For all his avant-garde reputation, Beefheart was a showman, and there's a playful theatricality in his music that in another life might have made him a housewives' favourite. You'd have a shock if you put the record on expecting some smooth strings though. I knew the album's reputation, of course - I was an obstreperous child and got that one because it had the most forbidding reputation - but the extraordinary noise that awaited me was something I wasn't prepared for. It took years (and I mean, around 10) for it to click that for all the complexities of time and tone, it was at heart a blues album. That moment of realisation brought everything into focus, and thereafter it seemed incomprehensible that I'd ever found this music forbidding. It never became comfortably familiar though. Like all great music, it remains unpredictable, startling, new.

It's nearly 30 years since Beefheart fell silent. He was advised that he'd never be taken seriously as a painter if he continued to record, so the Captain was put to rest and Don Van Vliet the painter took his place. There's a strong continuity between the painter and the musician. The paintings have that same playful experimentation as his music, and the music comes to seem painterly in the way he spreads sound across his canvas. So it's not really true to say that he'd been inactive in music since 1982; he'd just made music in pigment instead, where before he'd painted in sound. But beyond that, it seems an immediate loss just because he was so far ahead that we haven't really caught up yet.

Old Fart at Play

I resent the caution that comes with age.

When you're young you're reckless. You don't think about the consequences of your actions. You don't wonder if the idea's any good — it doesn't even occur to you that an idea you've had might not be. You just plow on, what the hell. If everything goes to shit, oh well — the next idea's here already, and this one's brilliant.

As you grow older, you question your ideas. I've heard it said that you get fewer, but I don't think this is so: I think it's more that you accept each one less uncritically, you question, and fewer get past that initial thought and make it to something realised. This isn't necessarily bad, of course. It's got something to do with wisdom, the experience that enables you to dismiss the idea that isn't going to go anywhere. You learn to conserve energy, because you don't have so much. You think of the boundless energy you had when you were young, and stupid, and thoughtless, and profligate in your thoughts, and wish you had that energy now, now that you've got the wisdom to expend it on valuable activities more than frivolous ones.

There's more to it than that, though. Sometimes I start to think, is this wisdom stopping me doing this? Or the complacency that received wisdom generates? Or is it fear? Growing older you learn the tricks, you negotiate the traps better, you avoid the failures. But failure's not always such a bad thing is it? Sometimes the mistakes are more valuable than the assured, competent execution, because they shake you out of your viewpoint. Sometimes they can give you that sudden realisation that there's another way to do things, that you hadn't thought of before. That's what keeps music, or any art, alive.

Of course sometimes mistakes are just shit and you're wasting your time, but you've got to take the risk.

That's what I resent about the caution. It stops you fucking up, but it can also stop the interesting fucking up that real proper actual art comes from. It's easy to learn, harder to un-learn.

Happy Birthday, Don

Beadle: No longer about

You may remember him as that smug git on all those rotten 80s tv shows, but something less well known about Jeremy Beadle is that as organiser of the Bickershaw Festival in 1972 he was resonsible for bringing Captain Beefheart to the UK for the first time. Because of this, I can forgive him for Henry Kelly.

Addendum: The internet throws up some strange connections. Henry Kelly went on from Game for a Laugh to present seminal daytime Euro-quiz Going for Gold, essential viewing for all students and unemployed layabouts in the early 90s, whose cheesy, yet indelibly etched onto my mind, theme song was written by the bloke who went on to score Ridley Scott's Gladiator.

Happy Birthday Don

Fast N Bulbous

I love Captain Beefheart. Let me make this clear. I need to convey how much I love Beefheart before I talk about this gig, so please bear with me.

When I was about 15, I liked to think of myself as someone who could get all the weird shit no-one else got. I listened to the Mary Chain, I listened to 8 Songs for a Mad King... I took pride in finding sense and truth in sounds others dismissed as noise.

And then, in the space of a few weeks, I did 2 things: I borrowed Bitches Brew from Birmingham Central Library and bought Trout Mask Replica.

These two albums were like nothing I could conceive of. There was nothing I could hang anything on, they were both just so far out. But I could hear, somewhere in this confusing noise, SOMETHING. Something very important that I knew I had to grasp, no matter how long it took.

In the event, it took me the best part of 10 years to understand those records. And it was worth every second when I reached that point when suddenly everything clicked and they became as clear as the simplest nursery rhyme to me. Since then I've always harboured a suspicion that any really great music takes a decade to understand, and if it doesn't, it's not really worth it.

Anyway, the point is that I love this music beyond reason. So when I heard that ex-Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas was coming to these shores with a new band dedicated to performing the Captain's music, I was intrigued, but also wary. I've seen Lucas perform before, both in his own right and with various collaborators, including the reconstituted Magic Band, so I knew that at least the evening would be a well presented, respectful display of Beefheart's music.

What I wasn't really prepared for was that the band would do something I'd have doubted possible: they didn't just play the tunes, they worked them to create something new. Everything they played was familiar, yet also sounded as if it were being recreated right in front of me. This show was presented under the aegis of the London Jazz Festival, and it succeeded purely in the terms you might expect from that: it presented Beefheart's music as a living, breathing thing, no museum exhibit.

I went expecting some good musicianship and some rekindling of memories. I got that - Gary Lucas played Evening Bell and Flavor Bud Living about 2 feet away from me, for chrissakes! - but I ended up buying the album, and more importantly, I went home dizzy in the joy of having been reminded in the best possible way why I love this music.

Do I sound lime a raving fanboy? I don't care. This was one of those rare evenings when I really felt the full force of what music is capable of. Did I mention that I LOVE Captain Beefheart?

Bowmans update: They're nearly there, but they still need your votes, and all your friends, people! Get on over to the Deli and do that voting thang! And then make your friends do it. And their friends. (&c.)